The Seventh Seal

Antonius Block: Reveal me your secrets
Death: I have no secrets
Antonius Block: You know nothing?
Death: I don’t have any knowledge.
That’s marvelous that even death itself could give us nothing… nothing about specific knowledge… We can believe, hope, and assume about the afterlife, but we would never know…

In “Being and Nothingness” Sartre once wrote: “Thus we must conclude in opposition to Heidegger that death, far from being my peculiar possibility, is a contingent fact which as such on principle escapes me and originally belongs to my facticity. … Death is a pure fact as is birth; it comes to us from the outside and it transforms us into the outside. At bottom, it is in no way distinguished from birth, and it is the identity of birth and death that we call facticity.”

Death is pure fact because it is not ours. We assume by interiorization that death could be our. But as a pure fact, it is not ours, just like knowledge about death. Bergman’s idea to show that living death, who speaks with the main character, doesn’t know what goes after “death as a fact” stimulates us to understand that death as a conception could be analyzed in two ways:
1. Human death: death is the limit of being, which belongs to the complexity of life, ending it;
2. Not-human death: beyond the "wall" that limits the presented process to non-existence.

So, Bergman’s “The Sevens Seal” gives us an understanding, that there cannot be guaranteed total catharsis or getting all the answers to metaphysical questions by watching this movie. But still, the scary aftertaste of embarrassment, enlightenment, and confusion will be rooted in the greatest depths of your soul for quite a while.